npm decides to keep their unpublish functionality but puts in place rules to prevent breaking other packages

npm writes on their blog:

One of Node.js’ core strengths is the community’s trust in npm’s registry. As it’s grown, the registry has filled with packages that are more and more interconnected.

A byproduct of being so interdependent is that a single actor can wreak significant havoc across the ecosystem. If a publisher unpublishes a package that others depend upon, this breaks every downstream project that depends upon it, possibly thousands of projects.

Last Tuesday’s events revealed that this danger isn’t just hypothetical, and it’s one for which we already should have been prepared. It’s our mission to help the community succeed, and by failing to protect the community, we didn’t uphold that mission.

The collaborators of the Node.js project and the members of the Node.js Foundation are proud to offer v4.0.0 for general release. This release represents countless hours of hard work encapsulated in both the Node.js project and the io.js project that are now combined in a single codebase. The Node.js project is now operated by a team of 44 collaborators, 15 of which form its Technical Steering Committee (TSC). Further, over 100 new individuals have been added to the list of people contributing code to core since v0.12.7.

Node.js v4.0.0 contains V8 v4.5, the same version of V8 shipping with the Chrome web browser today. This brings with it many bonuses for Node.js users, most notably a raft of new ES6 features that are enabled by default including block scoping, classes, typed arrays (Node’s Buffer is now backed by Uint8Array), generators, Promises, Symbols, template strings, collections (Map, Set, etc.) and, new to V8 v4.5, arrow functions.

The Internet of Things is growing and Samsung for one is choosing Node.js for microcontrollers

Samsung looks to leverage JavaScript as a mechanism for IoT (Internet of things) development with its IoT.js project.

The recently unveiled IoT.js serves as a lightweight version of Node.js. “IoT.js aims to provide interoperable service platform in the world of IoT, based on Web technology,” the IoT.js website states. “The target of IoT.js is to run in resource-constrained devices [having] only few kilobytes of RAM available device. Thus it will supports very wide range of ‘Things.'”

io.js v3 is essentially a beta release of Node.js v4 with significant updates including many ES6 features

Paul Krill writes:

Compatible with npm, io.js was spawned as a fork of Node.js late last year after disagreements arose over Node’s direction. Everything was smoothed over this spring, and the two factions, which had many of the same participants, agreed to reunite. “The governance of io.js and Node.js have already converged, all that is left is the technical side, and io.js v3 is a significant step towards completing it,” said Mikeal Rogers, who has served as a spokesman for io.js, in an email.

“Developers need to know about io.js v3 because it’s a significant change to the native side of the platform they’ll need to understand in order to prepare for Node.js v4,” Rogers said. He also noted version 3.0.0’s status as the likely last release line for the platform.

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Ken Snyder is a Software Craftsman specializing in PHP and JavaScript. Ken works in Salt Lake city for Right Intel.
He is the co-founder of UtahJS, an educational non-profit aimed at promoting JavaScript in Utah.